A ROUND TRIP TO DAVY JONES'S LOCKER
It was probably sheer imagination but the
characteristic most vivid was its transpar
ency. As I looked out I never thought of
feet or yards of visibility, but of the hun
dreds of miles of this color stretching over
so much of the world.
Life again became evident around thir
teen hundred feet, and mostly luminous.
After watching a hundred or more firefly
like flashes I turned on the searchlight and
saw nothing whatever. These sparks, bril
liant though they were, were kindled into
conflagration and quenched in the same
instant upon invisible bodies. Whatever
made them were too small to reach the
eyes, as was almost the host of copepods
and other tiny crustaceans through which
we passed now and then.
At one time I kept the electric light going
for a full minute while we were descend
ing, and I distinctly observed two zones of
abundance and a wide interval of scanty,
motelike life. When very close to the glass
I could clearly make out the jerking move
ments of copepods, but they were too small
to show anything more. The milky sagitta
or arrow worms were more easily detected,
the eye catching their swift dart and then
focusing on their quiet forms.
While still near thirteen hundred feet a
group of eight large shrimp passed, show
ing an indeterminate coloration. We never
took large shrimps at these comparatively
shallow levels in the trawling nets.
Barton had just read the thermometer
as 720 when I dragged him over to the
window to see two more Argyropelecus.
Before he went back to his instruments
three squids shot into the light, out and
in again, changing from black to barred to
white as they moved. They showed no
luminescence.
AT THE LOWEST DEPTH-A SOLID, BLUE
BLACK WORLD
At 10:44 we were sitting in absolute
silence, our faces reflecting a ghastly bluish
sheen. I became conscious of the pulse
throb in my temples and remember that I
kept time to it with my fingers on the cold,
damp steel of the window ledge. I shifted
the handkerchief on my face and carefully
wiped the glass, and at this moment we
felt the sphere check in its course--we
felt ourselves press slightly more heavily
against the floor and the telephone said
"Fourteen hundred feet."
I had the sensation of a few more me
tres' descent and then we swung quietly
at our lowest floor, over a quarter of a
mile below the surface.
I pressed my face against the glass and
looked upward and in the slight segment
which I could manage I saw a faint paling
of the blue. I peered down and again I
felt the old longing to go farther, although
it looked like the black pit-mouth of hell
itself-yet still showed blue.
I thought I saw a new fish flapping close
to the sphere, but it proved to be the wav
ing edge of the Explorers' Club flag
black as jet at this depth. My window was
clear as crystal, in fact clearer, for fused
quartz is one of the most transparent of
all substances and transmits all wave
lengths of sunlight. The outside world I
now saw through it was, however, a solid,
blue-black world, one which seemed born
of a single vibration-blue, blue, forever
and forever blue.
ALL RISKS AND COSTS ARE REPAID
I never doubted the success of the ad
venture as a whole, but I had had much
less faith in the possibility of seeing many
living creatures from the windows of the
bathysphere. The constant swaying move
ment due to the rolling of the barge high
overhead, the great, glaring white sphere
itself looming up through the blue murk,
the apparent scarcity of organisms at best
in the depths of the ocean as revealed by
our net hauls, and finally the small size of
the aperture, hardly as large as one's face
all these seemed handicaps too severe to be
overcome.
This secret skepticism made the actual
results all the more amazing. As fish after
fish swam into my restricted line of vi
sion,-fish, which heretofore, I had seen
only dead and in my nets, as I saw their
colors, and their absence of colors, their ac
tivities and modes of swimming and clear
evidence of their sociability or solitary
habits, I felt that all the trouble and cost
and risk were repaid manyfold.
After these dives were past, when I
came again to examine the deep-sea treas
ures in my net hauls, I would feel as an
astronomer might who looks through his
telescope after having rocketed to Mars
and back, or like a paleontologist who could
suddenly annihilate time and see his fossils
alive.
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